► The political campaign to reassert American power abroad after the Vietnam War made for some strange bedfellows. What brought together the pacifist civil rights leader…
(more)

▼ The political campaign to reassert American power
abroad after the Vietnam War made for some strange bedfellows. What
brought together the pacifist civil rights leader Bayard Rustin
with Republican venture capitalist and future CIA Director William
Casey? Why did Democrats Eugene Rostow and Jeane Kirkpatrick align
themselves with Ronald Reagan and other conservatives of the New
Right? The answer, I argue, can be found in the many challenges,
both real and perceived, that the Global South posed to American
power in the 1970s. As the United States began to appear vulnerable
militarily and economically, proclamations of “Third World
nationalism” and a “New International Economic Order” appeared to
some Americans as a vital threat to their interests. Eugene Rostow,
who spearheaded the anti-détente campaign, was not driven by his
fear of Soviet military superiority, but rather by the audacity of
the 1973 October War and subsequent OPEC oil embargo. Ronald
Reagan’s campaign manager—and future head of the CIA—William Casey
began his effort to promote a “return” to militarism after seeing
troubling signs of economic cooperation amongst poorer nations in
the mid-1970s. For Bayard Rustin it was the alliance between
African American progressives and Third World nationalists that
loomed as a threat to the Black-Jewish alliance he saw as vital to
the cause of economic justice. Jeane Kirkpatrick, meanwhile,
believed there were ominous parallels between activist uprisings in
the Democratic Party and Third World rebellion abroad. With
different reasons for supporting American empire, these four came
together in 1976 to form the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD).
Under this guise, these four spear carriers helped to lead the
public campaign against Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy, providing
the impetus for Ronald Reagan’s massive military armaments program
during the 1980s, as well as his administration’s interventionist
foreign policy in Central America. Sources for this dissertation
include the personal papers of Rostow, Rustin, Casey, Paul Nitze,
and others as well as the records of the CPD and the Atlantic
Council.
Advisors/Committee Members: Shibusawa, Naoko (Director), Self, Robert (Reader), Zipp, Samuel (Reader).

► In the 1910s, groups of middle-class women began organizing voluntary youth organizations to provide a blend of recreation, spirituality, patriotism, and character development for America's…
(more)

▼ In the 1910s, groups of middle-class women began
organizing voluntary youth organizations to provide a blend of
recreation, spirituality, patriotism, and character development for
America's girls. Since their modest beginnings, girls' clubs have
cycled millions of young women through character training programs
that contained within them gendered notions of citizenship, work,
education, and sexuality. This dissertation examines two of these
groups, the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. and the Young Women's
Christian Association's Y-Teens, from the end of World War II
through 1980. Drawing on training manuals, handbooks,
correspondence, periodicals, contemporary social science, oral
histories, and surveys, it explores how femininity and womanhood
were related to girls in the mid-twentieth century, as well as how
girls constructed their own identities within these spaces.At their
heart, girls' organizations sought an ideal of American girlhood
that balanced the development of individual interests, talents, and
abilities with social expectations for women. Chapters examine the
Girl Scouts' and YWCA's conception of the female citizen in the
immediate postwar period, their approach to interracial cooperation
and integration in the 1950s and early 1960s, and their initiatives
with respect to vocational and educational planning for girls. The
final chapter examines their feminist evolution in the 1970s, which
found them preparing young women for a much wider range of social
and political roles. Standing at the intersection of American
beliefs about childhood, citizenship, gender, and womanhood, this
dissertation argues that in a relatively conservative period that
celebrated women's place in the domestic sphere, these
organizations encouraged adolescent girls to embrace a model of
adult womanhood that valorized individual agency, careers outside
the home, and progressive ideas on racial and social equality, in
addition to domesticity.
Advisors/Committee Members: Buhle, Mari (Director), Self, Robert (Reader), Meckel, Richard (Reader).

Foley, J. L. (2010). "Meeting the Needs of Today's Girl": Youth Organizations and
the Making of a Modern Girlhood, 1945-1980. (Doctoral Dissertation). Brown University. Retrieved from https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:11087/

Chicago Manual of Style (16th Edition):

Foley, Jessica L. “"Meeting the Needs of Today's Girl": Youth Organizations and
the Making of a Modern Girlhood, 1945-1980.” 2010. Doctoral Dissertation, Brown University. Accessed May 25, 2019.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:11087/.

MLA Handbook (7th Edition):

Foley, Jessica L. “"Meeting the Needs of Today's Girl": Youth Organizations and
the Making of a Modern Girlhood, 1945-1980.” 2010. Web. 25 May 2019.

Vancouver:

Foley JL. "Meeting the Needs of Today's Girl": Youth Organizations and
the Making of a Modern Girlhood, 1945-1980. [Internet] [Doctoral dissertation]. Brown University; 2010. [cited 2019 May 25].
Available from: https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:11087/.

Council of Science Editors:

Foley JL. "Meeting the Needs of Today's Girl": Youth Organizations and
the Making of a Modern Girlhood, 1945-1980. [Doctoral Dissertation]. Brown University; 2010. Available from: https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:11087/

3.
Knapp, Bryan V.
‘The Biggest Business in the World’: The Nestlé Boycott and
the Global Development of Infants, Nations, and Economies,
1968-1988”.

► This dissertation is a study of a boycott during the 1970s and 80s against the largest food company on the planet, when activists accused Nestlé…
(more)

▼ This dissertation is a study of a boycott during the
1970s and 80s against the largest food company on the planet, when
activists accused Nestlé of killing babies in developing countries
with its infant formula products. Nestlé countered that it and the
formula industry actually saved babies, contributed to local
development, and solved many of the world’s economic and health
problems. At its most concrete, my project focuses on infant health
and political struggles over the private choices and basic economic
opportunities of ordinary people. At its most abstract, the work
demystifies the multinational corporation at a moment, the 1970s,
when it entered American consciousness as a global source of social
injustice. Corporations like Nestlé achieved their global position
by infiltrating and commodifying one of the most intimate realms of
human life – the political site of a woman’s body and her feeding
child. Which, from one perspective, demonstrates serious attempts
to incorporate survival commodities and the processes of life
itself. The dissertation explores the international boycott in
order to investigate concepts of growth and development, ideas of
universal world health, and the problems of regulating
multinational corporations. Its five chapters trace the rise of
baby food politics from the birth of formula manufacturing in the
late nineteenth century to a World Health Organization code of
conduct in the 1980s. The international politics of baby feeding
involved governments, the UN, activist networks, and ordinary
mothers around the world. The dissertation draws on archival
sources such as congressional and UN documents, corporate records,
health professional accounts and USAID research, church papers,
court cases and an extensive activist archive. Its actors include
NGOs, MNCs (Multinational Corporations), activists, health experts
and countless families in places like Nairobi and Bogota where
Nestlé’s efforts to sell formula coincided with the long process of
decolonization.
Advisors/Committee Members: Self, Robert (Director), Rockman, Seth (Reader), Borgwardt, Elizabeth (Reader).

Knapp, B. V. (2015). ‘The Biggest Business in the World’: The Nestlé Boycott and
the Global Development of Infants, Nations, and Economies,
1968-1988”. (Doctoral Dissertation). Brown University. Retrieved from https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:419562/

Chicago Manual of Style (16th Edition):

Knapp, Bryan V. “‘The Biggest Business in the World’: The Nestlé Boycott and
the Global Development of Infants, Nations, and Economies,
1968-1988”.” 2015. Doctoral Dissertation, Brown University. Accessed May 25, 2019.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:419562/.

MLA Handbook (7th Edition):

Knapp, Bryan V. “‘The Biggest Business in the World’: The Nestlé Boycott and
the Global Development of Infants, Nations, and Economies,
1968-1988”.” 2015. Web. 25 May 2019.

Vancouver:

Knapp BV. ‘The Biggest Business in the World’: The Nestlé Boycott and
the Global Development of Infants, Nations, and Economies,
1968-1988”. [Internet] [Doctoral dissertation]. Brown University; 2015. [cited 2019 May 25].
Available from: https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:419562/.

Council of Science Editors:

Knapp BV. ‘The Biggest Business in the World’: The Nestlé Boycott and
the Global Development of Infants, Nations, and Economies,
1968-1988”. [Doctoral Dissertation]. Brown University; 2015. Available from: https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:419562/

4.
Brucher, William Carl.
On the Edge of the Pacific Rim: Capitalism and Work on the
Los Angeles Waterfront.

► “On the Edge of the Pacific Rim” examines the history of Los Angeles Harbor as it was transformed into a major seaport from the late…
(more)

▼ “On the Edge of the Pacific Rim” examines the history
of Los Angeles Harbor as it was transformed into a major seaport
from the late nineteenth century to 1980. The harbor was
fundamental to the city’s status as a Pacific Rim metropolis and
its participation in the global economy. In the early twentieth
century, public ownership of the harbor proved the most effective
way of securing the private interests of those businesses organized
as the L.A. Chamber of Commerce. Here, as in other instances in the
history of American capitalism, marshaling the resources of the
state was indispensible to a pattern of development too readily
attributed to impartial market forces.
Business and political leaders pursued harbor commerce in the
1920s and 1930s. The commodities trade was an engine for the city’s
industrial growth, mitigated the effects of the Great Depression,
and set the stage for the region’s economic resurgence beginning in
World War II. In these same years, the L.A. Chamber of Commerce
organized trade missions to Asia and Latin America and urged the
city’s white business leaders to reassess their racial and cultural
attitudes toward their foreign counterparts in order to aid
commerce. However, Chamber leaders maintained their notions of
racial superiority and believed that they would dominate the
Pacific Rim economy. In this light, harbor development and foreign
trade were closely linked to the wielding of U.S. power abroad.
Finally, this study traces the relationships between harbor
enterprises and workers. The maritime unions of the 1930s and 1940s
gained control over the labor process and ensured that workers
shared in the harbor’s prosperity. Nevertheless, job segregation
persisted that pitted white, Latino, and African American workers
against one another. After World War II, container shipping,
liberal trade policies, and the increased flow of capital and goods
further integrated L.A. and the nation into the global economy.
While many political and business leaders welcomed these
developments, they threatened waterfront jobs and diminished the
region’s manufacturing base.
Advisors/Committee Members: Gorn, Elliott (Director), Rockman, Seth (Reader), Self, Robert (Reader).

Brucher, W. C. (2012). On the Edge of the Pacific Rim: Capitalism and Work on the
Los Angeles Waterfront. (Doctoral Dissertation). Brown University. Retrieved from https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:297670/

Chicago Manual of Style (16th Edition):

Brucher, William Carl. “On the Edge of the Pacific Rim: Capitalism and Work on the
Los Angeles Waterfront.” 2012. Doctoral Dissertation, Brown University. Accessed May 25, 2019.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:297670/.

MLA Handbook (7th Edition):

Brucher, William Carl. “On the Edge of the Pacific Rim: Capitalism and Work on the
Los Angeles Waterfront.” 2012. Web. 25 May 2019.

Vancouver:

Brucher WC. On the Edge of the Pacific Rim: Capitalism and Work on the
Los Angeles Waterfront. [Internet] [Doctoral dissertation]. Brown University; 2012. [cited 2019 May 25].
Available from: https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:297670/.

Council of Science Editors:

Brucher WC. On the Edge of the Pacific Rim: Capitalism and Work on the
Los Angeles Waterfront. [Doctoral Dissertation]. Brown University; 2012. Available from: https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:297670/

5.
Fingal, Sara C.Turning the Tide: The Politics of Land and Leisure on the
California and Mexican Coastlines in the Age of
Environmentalism.

► This dissertation examines the competing values of public access and private ownership along the California and Mexican coasts between 1964 and 1979. In four case…
(more)

▼ This dissertation examines the competing values of
public access and private ownership along the California and
Mexican coasts between 1964 and 1979. In four case studies,
encompassing local, state, and transnational battles, I analyze how
multiple groups and interests contended over coastal spaces and
politicized seaside leisure. Beginning on the urban coast of Los
Angeles where social justice activists protested the construction
of a yacht marina replacing a popular shoreline among diverse
beachgoers, the project moves north to the rural coastal zone of
Sonoma County. Along this northern coast, environmental activists
objected to the growth of private development blocking access to
public tidelands. This study then takes up the entire California
coastline in the statewide battle over the California Coastal Zone
Conservation Act, a political campaign that replayed at the state
level the local issues raised throughout the state. I conclude with
Americans building seaside homes across the border in Baja
California, despite Mexico’s constitutional law prohibiting
foreigners from owning land on the coast. By exploring conflicts
over coastal landscapes, this project expands the social and
cultural history of postwar American consumerism to include the
mass consumption of nature. This study also contributes to
political history by exploring the conflict between private and
public rights related to land usage. Finally, it enhances the
environmental history dialogue centered on a transitional moment in
the development of the modern environmental movement. From the
local neighborhood to the international border, this dissertation
considers the coastline as a space understood as both public
resource and private property, at once nature or wilderness and
urban or suburban. “Turning the Tide” tells the story of how
nature, politics, and culture intersected at a moment when
Americans were once again debating what constituted “rights” in
their society.
Advisors/Committee Members: Self, Robert (Director), Jacoby, Karl (Reader), Garcia, Matthew (Reader).

Fingal, S. C. (2012). Turning the Tide: The Politics of Land and Leisure on the
California and Mexican Coastlines in the Age of
Environmentalism. (Doctoral Dissertation). Brown University. Retrieved from https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:297668/

Chicago Manual of Style (16th Edition):

Fingal, Sara C. “Turning the Tide: The Politics of Land and Leisure on the
California and Mexican Coastlines in the Age of
Environmentalism.” 2012. Doctoral Dissertation, Brown University. Accessed May 25, 2019.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:297668/.

MLA Handbook (7th Edition):

Fingal, Sara C. “Turning the Tide: The Politics of Land and Leisure on the
California and Mexican Coastlines in the Age of
Environmentalism.” 2012. Web. 25 May 2019.

Vancouver:

Fingal SC. Turning the Tide: The Politics of Land and Leisure on the
California and Mexican Coastlines in the Age of
Environmentalism. [Internet] [Doctoral dissertation]. Brown University; 2012. [cited 2019 May 25].
Available from: https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:297668/.

Council of Science Editors:

Fingal SC. Turning the Tide: The Politics of Land and Leisure on the
California and Mexican Coastlines in the Age of
Environmentalism. [Doctoral Dissertation]. Brown University; 2012. Available from: https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:297668/

► Using official reports, academic studies, journalistic and literary sources, and original maps from census data, this study investigates Chicago's "riot zone" where most of the…
(more)

▼ Using official reports, academic studies, journalistic
and literary sources, and original maps from census data, this
study investigates Chicago's "riot zone" where most of the
interracial violence occurred in late-July, 1919, within and
surrounding the city's de facto segregated Black Belt. The race
riot was not principally about labor or the workplace following an
influx of African American migrants to Chicago from the South; it
was about social and residential space. The violence against blacks
during the riot was mostly committed by Irish-American gangs, but
the actions of these young men represented the most extreme
expression of a shared desire among whites to keep blacks
geographically sequestered.
The study relates the riot to the formation of a white racial
identity among the children of European immigrants, which developed
in tandem with new perceptions of manhood. In turn, manhood in this
era was becoming tied less to work and more to race. For many
children and grandchildren of immigrants, the legacy of the riot
was the growing bond between whiteness and masculinity.
African Americans were not mere victims of the violence. A
shared reverence for black soldiers and a "New Negro" ethos helped
to arouse the rapidly growing, and increasingly indignant African
American population in Chicago. Their militant response to racial
aggression in part grew out of the disappointment with the
realization that black military service in Europe failed to open up
opportunities in America.
Residential segregation in Chicago did not begin with the
race riot. But any hope of mixed living in the interwar years was
lost after 1919. The violence between the white and black lower
classes helped wealthier whites to justify a policy of "segregation
by agreement" in order to keep the peace.
Advisors/Committee Members: Gorn, Elliott (Director), Self, Robert (Reader), Lee, Robert (Reader).

► The Unquiet Americans presents a new account of the Vietnam-era soldier that is centered around the protest politics and countercultures of the 1960s. The histories…
(more)

▼ The Unquiet Americans presents a new account of the
Vietnam-era soldier that is centered around the protest politics
and countercultures of the 1960s. The histories of the antiwar
movement and Vietnam-era GIs are too often told separately. This
dissertation brings them together to place in new light the crisis
of the late Vietnam-era military, the end of the draft, and the
rise of the All-Volunteer Force. During the Vietnam War, soldiers
faced difficulties bound up with military service: truncated civil
liberties, racial inequality, abuse from higher-ups, and the
hardship of a war that many felt was "not worth it." Many troops,
influenced by the protest movements around them, responded to these
ordeals by forging a decentralized dissent movement within the
military and a vibrant GI counterculture. In creative and bold
ways, thousands of troops struggled for "GI rights" against
military justice, embraced the counterculture in defiance of their
higher-ups, formed soldier unions, distributed "underground" GI
newspapers, flocked to antiwar coffeehouses, and brought the Black
Power movement into the military. Their substantial alliances with
the civilian antiwar movement belie the popular narrative of an
anti-troop antiwar movement. Many soldiers also engaged in
non-ideological acts of disobedience that created a deep sense of
crisis among political and military leaders. Vietnam-era GI protest
contributed to the liberalization of traditional military
regulations and gave thousands of troops an outlet to express their
antiwar sentiments. This project gives voice to the soldiers whose
actions, in part, drove the late Vietnam-era military's crisis and
compelled a shift towards a volunteer Armed Forces. Using untapped
and underutilized sources – including hundreds of unearthed troop
letters, clandestine soldier newspapers and voluminous legal
records – The Unquiet Americans tells a story of active-duty GI
dissent that recasts the narratives of the Vietnam War, 1960s
protest movements and the Cold War Military.
Advisors/Committee Members: Self, Robert (Director), Gorn, Elliott (Reader), Shibusawa, Naoko (Reader).

▼ Abstract of "To Serve the Race...and Redeem the
South": Gender and the Southern Interracial Network, 1919-1949, by
Caroline C. Cortina, Ph.D., BrownUniversity, May 2011.Drawing on
correspondence, oral histories and published sources, this
dissertation examines the network of middle-class blacks and whites
who worked together to improve southern race relations from 1919 to
1949. The dissertation argues that their relationships, strategies
for confronting racial inequality and shifting goals were shaped by
often conflicting ideas about gender and racial identity. The
Commission on Interracial Cooperation, an organization formed in
1919 in response to growing concern over racial violence, best
articulated the interracial ideal: that southerners could forge
bonds of cooperation based on shared ideas of masculine and
feminine class identity and Christian duty and that these bonds
could provide a model for racial cooperation. The reality of how
blacks and whites worked together, however, rarely fit this ideal
as they struggled to find common ground amidst the increasing
challenges of more radical reform efforts.
Advisors/Committee Members: Patterson, James (Director), Self, Robert (Reader), Campbell, James (Reader).

► "Maternal Citizens: Gender and Women's Activism in the United States, 1945-1960" examines gender, citizenship, and postwar political culture. It focuses on the bi-partisan General Federation…
(more)

▼ "Maternal Citizens: Gender and Women's Activism in the
United States, 1945-1960" examines gender, citizenship, and postwar
political culture. It focuses on the bi-partisan General Federation
of Women's Clubs (GFWC), one of the nation's leading women's
organizations, and its gendered strategy for winning the Cold War.
The General Federation argued that, as mothers, women were
responsible for educating the citizenry in American values at home
and abroad. Charging clubwomen with this task, the GFWC positioned
clubwomen as the arbiters of national character, which the
organization identified with democracy, self-reliance, and free
enterprise. Reflecting the anticommunist zeitgeist as well as
clubwomen's white middle-class privilege, this construction defined
private institutions and actions as more American than state ones.
Locating women's public power in their domestic responsibilities
advanced a brand of maternalist politics. Although clubwomen had
long advocated maternalism ? the belief that women have special
qualities by dint of their motherhood that should be spread to
society at large ? the GFWC's postwar maternalism spoke to the
complexities of postwar political culture. The GFWC's prescriptions
for American homemakers and their local civic activism demonstrate
a deep unease with the shifting relationship between the private
citizen and the expanding welfare state. At the same time, however,
the GFWC's international program imagined clubwomen could conduct
grassroots diplomacy among women overseas to complement their
strong state's international military and diplomatic agenda. The
GFWC's construction of gendered citizenship deftly negotiated this
uncertain political terrain. Claiming maternal authority over
citizenship training, clubwomen framed these priorities as
apolitical "women's work." The project intervenes in the
historiography in several important ways: it adds to our
understanding of mainstream women's political culture; it
highlights gendered fissures in the New Deal order; and it provides
an important counterpoint to the masculinized gender analysis found
in most Cold War literature. "Maternal Citizens" considers the
political work motherhood was able to do during the Cold War in
ways that defies easy political categorization and complicates
traditional postwar narratives.
Advisors/Committee Members: Buhle, Mari Jo (director), Self, Robert (reader), Gorn, Elliott (reader).

► This dissertation explores the political, cultural and social identities of middle class Americans in the post-World War I period - their greatest moment of class…
(more)

▼ This dissertation explores the political, cultural and
social identities of middle class Americans in the post-World War I
period - their greatest moment of class consciousness then to date.
Identifying as "middle class consumers," they formed "home garden
committees" to combat rising food prices, founded "wear overalls
clubs" to bring down the cost of clothing, organized the first
"middle class" tenant associations to protect themselves from rent
increases, and even attempted to establish a "middle class union."
Feeling "squeezed" between elites and the working class, this
growing contingent of salaried "brain workers" blamed their
situation on capitalist "profiteers" and "unproductive" workers
during a national upsurge of strikes. I argue that in the
post-World War I period, middle class Americans developed and
organized around a shared identity that simultaneously reflected
their acceptance of their roles as consumers and their ambivalence
toward consumer society. Middle class Americans sought to impose a
set of producerist values onto an emerging consumer economy that
seemingly favored the working and elite classes, during a
significant period of transition in middle class identity from a
nineteenth century producerism to a growing consumerist
subjectivity. These Americans drew on the Progressive Era
organizing strategy of state-centered voluntarism, and called for
an even more direct state intervention into the market. They also
separated themselves from the working class, and shifted
progressive goals to reflect their own self-interested values.
These values, they asserted, were those of "consumers"- those of
the "people."
Advisors/Committee Members: Buhle, Mari Jo (director), Self, Robert (reader), Gorn, Elliott (reader).

► This dissertation examines how a conservative definition of "family values" became ascendant in American politics. The project focuses on New York State from 1970, when…
(more)

▼ This dissertation examines how a conservative
definition of "family values" became ascendant in American
politics. The project focuses on New York State from 1970, when
abortion was legalized there, through the elections of 1980 – a span
of ten years when feminists and an emerging conservative family
values movement competed side-by-side to define the family.
Relating local events to national political realignment, the
dissertation illustrates how conservative grassroots activists, led
by Catholic middle-class white women, organized to defend nuclear
families, heterosexual marriage, and traditional gender roles. In
doing so, they created the nation's most robust Right to Life Party
and defeated a state-level Equal Rights Amendment in 1975. These
self-declared average "housewives" were more than conservative
shock troops. They were inventing a new conservatism that the GOP's
right wing seized upon to gain political advantage. By 1980,
conservative, anti-feminist Republicans with suburban appeal had
usurped power from more liberal, pro-feminist Republicans based in
New York City – the so-called "Rockefeller Republicans" in the late
Governor Nelson Rockefeller's mold. Based on oral histories,
archival research, and never-before-seen documents from activists,
the project builds on and revises several important histories of
the postwar New Right in America. These existing works have
disproportionately explored how race and Cold War geopolitics
shaped liberalism's decline and conservatism's rise after the
tumultuous sixties. Few have considered gender – and even fewer have
examined ordinary women working at the grassroots level – as this
dissertation does. The project also offers an important
intervention in related historiography that confines the rise of
modern conservatism to America's Sunbelt region. New York's
political history from the seventies contains strong evidence of
feminist and anti-feminist campaigns; at the time, there was a
clear division in the state between the liberal and conservative
factions of the Republican Party. These factors make New York, as
opposed to a Sunbelt locale, an excellent case study of how family
values campaigns constructed feminism as "anti-family" and moved
the politics of the Republican Party and the nation to the
right.
Advisors/Committee Members: Self, Robert (Director), Buhle, Mari Jo (Director), Shibusawa, Naoko (Reader).

► In telling the place-specific history of the Chicago Bulls, this study argues that sports franchises at the end of the twentieth century shaped and capitalized…
(more)

▼ In telling the place-specific history of the Chicago
Bulls, this study argues that sports franchises at the end of the
twentieth century shaped and capitalized on changes in the
structure of urban growth in ways that went beyond well-publicized
stories of taxpayer-funded sports facilities. While it confirms the
cynicism of economists about the use of public money for
sports-linked development, it also suggests that, by zooming in on
controversies over public funding of stadiums, existing scholarship
on the urban political economy of sports has overlooked key
relationships and historical processes undergirding the
contemporary power and profitability of teams like the Bulls. The
first part of the study uncovers how the Bulls encouraged and
profited from efforts by local pro-growth institutions to re-market
Chicago as a “city of leisure.” The team initially became a prized
asset among Chicago’s growth coalition not because of its role in
stadium development, but rather as a result of its purported value
as an urban “brand.” When the owners did eventually open a new
stadium in 1994, its profitability depended on the emerging market
of moneyed Chicagoans who embraced professional basketball as a
centerpiece of the city’s new entertainment infrastructure. The
second part delves into the political and planning histories of the
United Center, which quickly became a nationally heralded example
of how public-private partnerships could allegedly work in the
interests of both growth-minded developers and poor residents.
However, this narrative obscures how arena developers abetted
efforts by local leaders to marginalize nearby public housing
residents, as well as the lack of any systematic evidence that the
arena has spurred ancillary economic development. The final part of
the dissertation deals with little-known strategies used by team
ownership to insulate investment in the United Center from risk
through the co-optation of local government institutions. It
suggests that, contrary to the existing academic consensus, the
Bulls’ success in doing so had more to do with broad structural
changes in the relationship between capital and government than
with special monopoly powers wielded by the professional sports
business.
Advisors/Committee Members: Gorn, Elliott (Director), Bennett, Larry (Reader), Logan, John (Reader), Self, Robert (Reader).